


Command Me to Be Well

by SquirrellyThief



Category: Darkest Dungeon (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe-Modern Setting, F/M, I'd like to apologize to God for things I make devout Catholics do, Problematic Themes, Self-Harm, Unhealthy Relationships, bodily harm as a form of self-medication for mental illness, dead dove do not eat, general harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 02:08:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16053212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquirrellyThief/pseuds/SquirrellyThief
Summary: He goes off with a fanatical zeal that would have made even the most conservative of her rearers feel faint. She hardly listens to any of it, trying to call back more of Lawrence’s warnings, his advice, his lessons learned from experience with Fergus but she doesn’t get anything useful. Lawrence had no idea how he reset to normal after a few days of this hysteria.But Fergus has often claimed that pain centered him. Cleared his thoughts. He had the scars of years of self-medication to prove its efficacy. Maybe that’s the trick.





	Command Me to Be Well

When he opens the door, it’s clear Fergus is not his usual self. His smile is stapled on so wide it calls attention to the gap of his missing incisor. His hands clutch the door and the frame so tightly it turns his ragged nails white. The hood of his jacket is pulled so low Rosamund can barely see the tip of his nose. His voice is thin and reedy when he says, “Oh. Hey, Ros. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Are you okay?” She asks leaning forward a bit, trying to get the light of the stairwell to catch his face. It doesn’t. The shadows make him seem almost sinister. In those patches of darkness Rosamund swears she can see something ancient and horrible. She struggles against the instinct to focus on it. That way lies madness, she knows.

“I’m fine,” he laughs “Just fine.” The laughter dies. Fergus, realizing he’s not helping his cause by sounding strange tries for serious but overshoots that mark too, “What are you doing here?”

“Yuliana wanted the apartment to herself,” Rosamund says, cautious. She doesn’t mention that the reason is so Yules and her boyfriend can go through their bi-weekly fight-then-makeup-sex routine and Rosamund is tired of having to drown it out. She likes Toto, but there’s only so many covers of  _ Africa _ one person can blare before they get sick of it. “Is Lawrence here?” Usually Fergus’s roommate says hello the minute the door opens, even if there’s no way he can know it’s her on the other side.

“No.” Fergus answers a bit too quickly. “He took a shift tonight.”

They stand there awkwardly for a moment. “May I come in?” Rosamund prompts.

There’s a hesitation long enough Rosamund can feel the seconds tick by in the pit of her stomach before Fergus lets her inside. He steps behind the door to allow her to pass into the light of the living room. At first glance, everything seems to be in its place. But there’s an eeriness to it. An unnatural stillness, like the walls are painted facades waiting for the slightest touch to tip them over and reveal the chaos beyond. She listens, but hears nothing but the door clicking shut. When she looks, Fergus is leaning against it, blocking her only means of egress.

Something deeply ingrained whispers that all men are dangerous and it sounds suspiciously like Sister Mary Katherine. Because of course it does. Every word of excessive caution sounds like Sister Mary Katherine in Rosamund’s head these days.

In the light, Fergus seems a little more himself. The same rough-worn red jacket half-zipped, face covered, and torn denim Rosamund had met him in. His feet are bare and from what she can see, so are his forearms for a change. The fake medical bracelet on his right wrist sparkles as he folds his arms across his chest. Rosamund tastes acid. She really wishes he’d stop wearing that thing. Lest something happen and some fool takes the “Do Not Resuscitate” instructions seriously. 

His prolonged silence unnerves her. “Am I interrupting something?” She wants to fill the space his change of attitude has left but knows she can’t. Not really. Perhaps she should have called first, asked for permission to come over despite his assertions that girlfriend privileges made her perpetually welcome. She swallows the feeling, pushes it out of her mind. Something is very wrong and that requires her focus right now. She can beat herself up for social failings later.

“No.”

She frowns at him and in her best impression of Sister Mary Agatha she says, “ _ Fergus _ .” And his shoulders drop a little, his defensive wall rattled. Well, at least the nuns gave her  _ one _ skill that proved useful in later life.

“What?”

“What is going on?”

Rosamund squares her shoulders when he stalks toward her and doesn’t relax even when he walks past her to plop himself onto the sofa. In that stony silence she feels like the parent of a petulant teenager. 

“Nothing is going on.” He says and he folds his arms again, but not before Rosamund can see why: to hide the trembling. But it still manifests elsewhere, the energy forcing itself out in a feverish bouncing of his foot on the floor.

She sits down next to him, sets her bag of books and paperwork under the coffee table and out of harm’s way. She puts her hand on his knee and he flinches away from her so violently she has to pull her hand back. “Why are you acting like this?” When he doesn’t answer, she reaches up. Her fingers skirt the stitching of his hood, “Let me see your face.”

“Don't touch me-” Anger. He scoots back, “I won’t-” his voice drops to a mumble Rosamund can barely hear, “I cannot lean on others. Or I will lose my way.”

What?

And it clicks into place. That vague warning Lawrence had given her the first time she’d slept here. The one about Fergus and his weird episodes. He’d been under a lot of stress lately and was bound to crack eventually. Though, when Lawrence had talked about a martyrdom complex and denying creature comforts to the extreme, Rosamund had not pictured  _ this _ . She wondered if he would actually start quoting scripture or if Lawrence had been exaggerating that part.

“Fergus,” she says, a little gentler, trying to get through to  _ her _ Fergus underneath whatever this was. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m  _ great _ , Ros.” He says and the stapled-on smile widens.

She puts a hand on his arm. He tries to flinch away again, but she doesn’t let him get far. Against the flat of her palm she can feel the thrum of anxious energy coursing through him. “You’re shaking.”

“I can barely contain myself,” Fergus chirps. This isn’t his normal aggressive cheeriness. The hyperpigmented positivity that made up the man’s nonsensical charismatic power. This was giddy. Like he knew some secret Rosamund didn’t and was mocking her with it. He leans in a little closer, “Just  _ full to bursting _ with zeal.”

“Fergus, you’re starting to worry me,” she says. Rosamund braces herself to make some nasty phone calls. Though she knew, in Fergus’s case, lockup would probably just make him worse, but if she had to lay him out she wasn’t going to linger or leave him unsupervised. Not when he lacked the control to not avoid doing real, permanent damage.

“I told you. I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.” He pulls his arm away from her and drapes it over the back of the couch. Though he doesn’t invade her cushion, he does get close enough to get her to ball her fist and tense her arm.

She gave him a concussion once, she could do it again, God damn it.

“I am burdened with glorious purpose,” he says, instead of whatever nonsense Rosamund had been expecting. “It fills my every thought and surges in me.” He tosses his head back and laughs, “It’s almost too much.” His head snaps back down unnaturally; too sharp, a puppet on strings. “A lesser man would unravel at the seams under the weight of this burden.”

“Fergus…”

“But not me. No. It’s been years and it gets heavier and heavier, but I am still the last man standing. I am one with the weight. Its strength flows through me.”

“Fergus, you aren’t yourself.”

“No,” he breathes, “No, I’m  _ better _ .”

She lets that one hang in the air for a moment. She wonders what refuting the statement would do. Probably nothing. That’s her best guess anyway. Or spark an argument she’d lose not because of flawed logic but just raw frustration. The way one loses arguments to walls.

_ When all is lost, stand firm _ . She tells herself.

“You’re so tightly wound,” she says, “have you managed to clear your head at all?” She has a good feeling he’ll know what that means. Fergus really only has one way of clearing his mind. One Ros refuses to condone publicly, though behind closed doors she’ll admit it doesn’t bother her as much as she pretends it does for appearances’ sake.

Fergus’s smile falters. “No. I haven’t. Not yet.” He turns his head to her and even though she can’t see his eyes, Rosamund can feel his suspicion. “Why?”

“Perhaps you should. You sound,” she tries to find an accurate word that isn’t just ‘crazy’, “unfocused.”

“Unfocused?” 

“Yeah.” She says, hoping it’ll spark him to argue against her assessment and buy her a minute to think.

And she’s right. He goes off with a fanatical zeal that would have made even the most conservative of her rearers feel faint. She hardly listens to any of it, trying to call back more of Lawrence’s warnings, his advice, his lessons learned from experience with Fergus as a housemate, but she doesn’t get anything useful. Lawrence had no idea how he reset to normal after a few days of this hysteria. Only that he did  _ something _ when Lawrence wasn’t looking too closely.

But  _ Fergus _ often claimed that pain centered him. Cleared his thoughts. He had the scars of years of self-medication to prove its efficacy. Maybe that’s the trick. 

While he rambles, Rosamund bends and finds the long string of wooden beads she keeps with her prayer book in the front pocket of her bag. A simple rosary, a gift from Sister Mary Katherine when Rosamund chose to go to a public college instead of the old Christian institution the nuns had picked out for her. 

When his right hand drifts too close to her, she drops it into his palm and closes his hand around it. 

He stops suddenly looking at it and then at her.

Her hand lingers on his in what she hopes is a grounding gesture. “Let me help you,” she offers. 

“I don’t need the kind of help you offer.” He says, starting to pull his hand away, but she catches him by the wrist.  He fights her so hard that her grip makes the joint pop and digs the chain of the bracelet into the jut of bone. It’ll bruise but she doesn’t care. A bruise is small change in the grand scheme. 

She pushes his sleeve up to the elbow. His arms  _ are _ totally bare underneath. Rosamund’s breath catches at the sight of his skin, cross-hatched from elbow to palm. Some scars rise, light, uniform. Others deep, textured, and open. The ones fussed with, cleaned with salt or tended to too late, flushed with depth or sun-stained brown with age. Cuts, burns, puncture wounds. A whole sliver just  _ missing _ and marring the textbook musculature of his forearm. None of them are fresh. She runs her fingers down it, feather light, like it could still, somehow hurt him. Like he would care if it did. “You sure about that?” She digs her thumbnail into clear space.

Fergus stops fighting her. A smile spreads across his face. Mischievous and infinitely better than the one he’d had on earlier. “Oh? The Almost-Sister wants to take the lash to me?”

“I’m not going to beat you, Fergus. I’m not a barbarian.” She says, immediately putting the idea of flogging down immediately. Rosamund knows how that he’ll goad her, push her to anger, push her to beat him for real and not for benefit. He’ll do it no matter what she does, but at least with this there’s no physical outlet for her anger. She’ll be forced to control it.

Rosamund kneads the muscle of his arm with the heel of her hand. 

“Piety demands blood,” He purrs and it’s as good a consent as any.

She releases his arm. 

He holds up her rosary, “How many?”

“All of them.”

“What?! Ros-”

She stops him with a hand on his. “ _ When health wanes, only prayer can restore it _ ,” she says, firm. “And I need time to get everything together. I will do this right, and your impatience will not deter me.”

Fergus sets his jaw but doesn’t argue.

He tests the weight of her rosary in his hand, rolling the polished rosewood between his fingers. He cycles through a full decade, getting used to it, then lets the strand’s weight carry him back to the beginning. Fergus lingers on the first one and Rosamund recites the prayer in her own head, seeing if she can time it right. He finishes and flicks to the next bead maybe three words after she would.

It gives her some time.

Rosamund rises from her seat, watching him count three beads before she can pry herself away. Now, with some distance, her heart hammers in her chest. Her hands tremble when she slips into his bedroom. The stillness of the rest of apartment hasn’t reached this place yet. The light is still warm, the dark tones of spray painted IKEA furniture soak in that warmth and hold onto it. A weak, childish part of her just wants to sink into his bed and sleep until the world normalizes again.

Rosamund shakes off the urge. She needs to focus.

Under his bathroom sink she finds most of what she needs. Clean towels, the sealed glass jar of coarse grain salt he normally uses and a small cardboard box of razor blades, each wrapped in its own protective sleeve. She takes one and slips it into her breast pocket. She finds a lighter on his nightstand; a cheap, pale blue thing at odds with the dark colors of the room. It joins the blade in her pocket.

His personal first-aid kit is a little harder to find. Rosamund knows, logically, he must have one somewhere. Given his proclivities and his reluctance to raise alarm about them when they’re self-inflicted. But it isn’t under the sink, in the nightstand drawers, or any of the places  _ she _ would reasonably stash one. Pressed for time, she gives up on finding it. Luckily she knows where Lawrence keeps the general use one (in the laundry room by the fire extinguisher, her little mishap with the glass has a silver lining after all) and hopes it has everything she’ll need.

By some miracle that is probably named Perci O’Donnell and lives across the hall, it does. Though it is probably a miracle borne of the good doctor’s perpetual exasperation with Fergus waking her at odd hours than any altruism on her part. 

Rosamund drops off her supplies on the kitchen counter. On the sofa, Fergus has crossed his legs, arms resting on his knees, his head bowed in prayer. His hands are still shaking, his body just vibrating with the pent-up energy. His empty hand clenches so tight Rosamund can’t see the scars on his knuckles anymore. He ticks through the decades in steady, even beats. Rosamund envies his discipline a little. The nuns used to scold her something awful for rushing the Hail Marys when she was small.

She coils her braid up into a tight bun, off the back of her neck. She plugs the sink and runs cold water, catching some in her hands and using it to slick down the dark, annoying flyaways brushing against her brow. As it fills she goes through the boys’ cabinets and hunts down a large glass bowl. That gets filled halfway with water, and then to the brim with ice from the freezer door. Something about all this provision gathering is comforting in its methodical simplicity. She scrubs her hands, soap and special attention to the spaces under her nails. She cuts off the sink, stalls for as long as she can. 

Her rosary clatters against the table and she knows she can wait no longer. Juggling all her supplies to make it in one trip is a little challenging; bowl of ice water balanced on top of the stack of towels, the kit’s handle and the jar of salt straining one hand. 

“Impatient,” she scolds, laying everything out, open and within easy reach. She draws out the process with as many tedious little steps as possible.  Rosamund tells herself it’s so he has plenty of time to back out of this. But she knows Fergus better than that. He’d never back out of his own accord not without some worse alternative to turn to.

When she straightens, looming in front of him, her knees almost touching him in the small space between coffee table and sofa, he’s watching her through the shadow of his hood. “Take off your jacket.” 

Fergus tips his head at her, but obeys. He unrolls the sleeve she pushed up and tosses the whole thing aside. He has a thin, oversized black v-neck on under it. He runs a hand through his hair to work out the static. He’s due for a haircut, dark hair shaggy and tangled, greasy at the roots from a long day. He peers up at her, scared brow quirked and tips his head to the right. He looks worn out and wired in equal measure.

“Shirt too.” She says. He doesn’t  _ need _ to take it off, but she hates it when he looks at her like that. It reminds her too much of the first time she’d seen his whole face. How she’d stared at the spiderweb of scars on his temple and cheek and kept glancing at the silvery white lens of his blind left eye. How he’d chastised her for being so impolite and she’d felt horribly guilty for weeks afterward.

He smirks at her and bends to pull it over his head. In the seconds before he straightens, Rosamund sees the skin of his shoulder blades. It’s torn to shreds, glistening pink and red and still bleeding in places. It’s almost pretty, how he’s managed to condense the marks of a lash in such controlled places. Like wings torn free.

She wants to reach out and touch them. 

Instead she fiddles with the buttons of her shirt for something to do with her hands.

He tosses the shirt with his jacket over the arm of the couch. “You want me to take off my pants too?”

Rosamund sets her jaw and narrows her eyes at him. Already he tries to rile her up. This might still be challenging.

She shrugs out of her cardigan, setting it with his things, and takes the largest out of her stack of towels. She decides to focus on his left arm. He’s less likely to cause inadvertent damage to his non-dominant side.

With a little force, she pushes him backward, making him to straighten out and lean his raw back against the scratchy throw-blanket they keep draped over the back of the sofa. It takes all of her willpower not to let her eyes wander over him. That isn’t what this is. She isn’t here to stare. She’s going to wrestle her Fergus out of whatever dark hole he’s fallen into and nothing more.

Nothing more, she tells herself again when his knees inch apart just a little too far to be incidental. She pointedly looks away, reaching for a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the first-aid kit as she does.

Rosamund bolsters the last of her resolve and plants herself in Fergus’s lap. She doesn’t straddle him; that would be too comfortable for either of them. She treats him more like an extension of the couch, sitting sideways so her legs can prop up his arm and she always has one arm with enough free space around it to take a good swing at him if she has to. She digs her elbow into him when he tries to adjust the position into something he prefers.

The towel, unfolded to cover her lap, props up his arm. She sets the bottle of alcohol in between the cushions while she looks for a blank space. There’s less of it here than on the other arm, Rosamund notices. Anything that looks about right, she touches, prods, pokes at with her nails. She feels the tug of Fergus’s free hand on her shirt tail the jittering of his shaky grip and tries to ignore it. He presses his lips to her shoulder; no affection to be found for miles. He just wants to watch what she’s doing.

“..and this holy man flayed himself with a single prolonged cut,” his voice is muffled, “And so he ascended…”

She finds a spot, a small patch of space below the bend of his elbow along the outside of his arm. She measures out three finger widths of space; there are marks that overlap it, but they seem to be old and thin enough to not matter. With the corner of the towel and the alcohol she scrubs at it roughly until the skin’s pinked and warm.

Fergus closes his fist, flexing the muscle under her attentions. She pinches the soft crook of his elbow. “Don’t do that. Relax.”

He huffs, but obeys.

Rosamund isn’t sure if it’s Fergus’s trembling rattling her or if her own hands are shaking as she pulls the blade and the lighter from her pocket. Her touch is light as she can manage without dropping the thin sliver of metal as she pulls the protective sheet of cardboard from around it. She has to try a couple of times to get the lighter struck and burning, and when she manages the flame dances with all the motion around it. A few passes through the clearest, bluest parts at the base and she deems that good enough and puts the lighter away.

She can prolong this no longer.

“Be still,” she says, resting her hand on his arm, bracketing her starting point between her index finger and her thumb. 

There’s no answer. Fergus tenses and shifts, trying to settle, but doesn’t still.

“Fergus.”

“I’m trying.” He mutters into her shoulder.

Rosamund takes a deep breath through her nose, pushes down on his arm to hold him still, and sinks the blade in. It’s so sharp there’s virtually no resistance, the corner just vanishes and beads of red well up around it. Fergus takes a sharp breath through his nose and holds it as she pulls the blade across. The cut’s only an inch or two when she pulls her hand back, but it bleeds almost immediately, even before she starts pressing at the skin around it, aggravating it. The line of bright red widens, its edges wavy and irregular a second, and then it rolls over the curve of his arm finding the towel and splattering against it. Red seeps into grey and turns a muddy black that grows like a Rorschach pattern that says something damning about their relationship.

“Another,” Fergus says, half begging, half demanding. 

He’s perfectly still for the second cut. It’s longer than the first. Deeper too, Rosamund notes with a pang of guilt as her fingers come back red as the blade this time.

He presses his forehead to her shoulder, laughing. “Another.”

She drags the corner of the blade along for a third pass. It’s too quick, too hesitant, it barely breaks the skin. Rosamund drops the blade into her bowl of ice water to get it out of her hand.

“Another.”

And she says, “No.”

He stops laughing, picking his head up from her shoulder to look at her. All she can see from this angle is his blind eye, and she refuses to look directly at it. He presses his torn arm to her midriff and drags her closer. 

But Rosamund isn’t having any of his bullshit tonight. She knows she can take him in a fight and she  _ will _ if she has to. She forces her elbow into his breast bone surges up. It only takes a few quick seconds before she’s straddling him, holding him down; one hand pinning his wounded arm to her thigh, the other in his hair yanking his head back.

“I said be still.” She growls at him. “You’ll take what I give you. Nothing more.”

He  _ howls _ with laughter and tugs against her grip on his hair. She’s got too much of it for him to tear free and she proves it by twisting and forcing his head to the side. When she finally settles her weight in his lap again she can feel how hard he’s gotten in a way that’s impossible to completely ignore with it pressing against her thigh like that.

“It’s hardly a penance if you enjoy paying it, Fergus,” she says. Or, she feels herself say it, but it doesn’t sound like her voice.

He just pants at her through a gap-toothed grin. When he swallows his throat clicks so loud she can hear it. And it  _ does _ something to her. Something dark. Something instinctive that demands all focus of her thoughts.

Instead of giving into it, Rosamund directs her attention to his arm. She presses her fingers to the skin between the cuts, works the muscle with as much force as she can, pulls the skin taut so it opens wider. His blood is hot and slick turning tacky in the webbing and creases of her fingers. The pressure and angle of her grip presses her fingertips into the wounds. Her middle sinks farthest into that too-deep second line.

That darkness in her thoughts comes forward. The one acutely aware of every little move Fergus makes against her. The one that flicks her gaze down his scarred chest. The one that froths at the mouth for more than her conscience is willing to steal. It whispers in her mind how  _ familiar _ the sensation is. How often she thinks of him when she’s alone, sinking her fingers into a different slit with something other than blood to slick them.

Rosamund grinds her teeth and forced the thought back to wherever it came from.

She knows, on some level, that she can only do so much damage before the area goes numb to stimuli. But that doesn’t deter her. She scrapes her thumbnail along the lower edge of the deepest one, feels  _ something _ collect beneath her nail. And the whole time, Fergus doesn’t try to jerk his arm back. Doesn’t flinch. Barely moves against her hand in his hair. He just  _ takes _ it. Leans into it even, groans like she’s working a knot out of his shoulder and not tearing at fragile flesh. Flexes his arm to surge the blood anew with a satisfied sound.

Eventually, he stills. His reactions become less and less, and she can tell he’s going numb to it. Can feel the impatient shift of his legs beneath hers. She twists the hand in his hair to stop him from talking well before he probably thinks to begin. 

She pulls her right hand away. Her left holds on to stop him from chasing her as she twists and leans over to dip her bloody fingers into the salt. The course grains grind like sand in the beds of her fingertips, embed themselves under her short nails. 

Slowly, as to dislodge as few gains as possible, she brings her hand back. With no warning or prelude, she locks her joints of her fingers and presses them to the widest section of each split. Blood beads into her cuticles, around the sides she can feel the edges of the cut and below. And that unhelpful false equivalency is back in her ear again.

And he  _ screams _ . A primal, visceral noise. It isn’t the high, thin shriek of sudden agony. No. This is deeper. From the chest. Very nearly a groan if not for its volume and duration. So loud and so close Rosamund feels it, like the heat that seeps into her blood when he touches her. And it pools between her legs in a similar way. His forehead presses to her shoulder so firmly she feels the turn of his brow through the thin fabric of her shirt, the clench of his fingers at her waist. He doesn’t try to pull his arm back even when she scrubs the salt in. 

When she loosens her grip, he whimpers, a plaintive, pathetic little sound. “Again.”

This time, she obliges him. She leans, recoats her fingers, and slides them across the length of each wound. The noise he makes is shorter this time; a real groan. Like she’s put aloe on a burn instead of burying her fingers into his bleeding arm.

“Again.” Barely enough breath to be audible now.

“No.” Rosamund says, she keeps her hand relaxed, but still touching him. “You’ve had enough.”

“Ros,” he begs, and it’s so absolutely pitiful she almost gives in. 

Instead she unfolds the bloody towel under his arm halfway and drapes it over the wounds. She puts pressure on his arm, trapped between her palm and leg, intent to stop or at least slow the bleeding now. His head tips back, baring his throat. Again with the blood-warming groan. Rosamund watches his Adam’s apple bob as she leans into her right hand, sitting up a little straighter to get a better angle. She feels the line of his arm dig into the muscle of her thigh even through the layers of towels and her skirt. The dark voice is back, encouraging her to imagine bone bowing beneath her weight. Snapping, sudden and loud like a gunshot. How his eyes would flutter. How he’d whimper and ask her -- _ beg _ her-- to do the other one too.

She forces the thought out; there’s no way she’d be able to break his arm like this. She doesn’t want to. She says it to herself once more for good measure. She does not want to break Fergus’s arm. Like this or ever.

Every breath he takes comes out with a little noise that gets quieter and quieter until he’s just panting at the ceiling.

She relents, releasing him and sitting back. His whole body shudders with the release of tension. His head lolls into her hand and she drags the pad of her thumb across his cheekbone. When his eyes flicker open, they only get about halfway. The warm brown of the right almost entirely usurped by the endless void of the pupil. She slides her palm across his cheek and scratches his hairline. He leans into it.

“Good,” she sighs, “I think we’re done. I’m gonna clean these now, okay?”

For a second, Fergus pouts and she wants to slap him, but the expression doesn’t hold on his face. He melts into the couch and nods, eyes drifting shut.

“Okay.” She says again, more to herself than to him. All the adrenalin of the moment leaves her at once. Uneasily, she shifts out of his lap, settling against his side, his wounded, bloody arm back in her lap. She takes one of the clean towels from the coffee table and dips it in the pinked ice water, then squeezes it out. Dip, squeeze, dip, squeeze until her fingertips are clean too and she can feel the ground under her again. Gingerly, she presses the towel to the edge of the first cut and wipes away salt and congealing blood to look at the damage. 

The first one’s pretty wide, bleeding sluggish, but persistent. She might need to stitch it closed. The second is worse off than the first, it almost looks torn at the ends. She cringes at the sight of the inflamed and ragged edges. The third seems to have stopped bleeding on its own, which comes to her as a relief.

She rummages around in the first aid kit for the suture kit. Briefly she considers going across the hall and knocking on Perci’s door. She has more experience with quickie living room first aid of the Fergus variety, but decides against it. If it’s truly bad enough, Rosamund reasons, she’ll drag Fergus to Perci’s tomorrow when the sun’s out and there are more people around to force him if he resists.

It takes a couple stitches to get a rhythm down for knots and loops. Each pass of the needle pulls a little noise out of Fergus, not quite miserable, but not the ecstatic enthusiasm of before. More an acknowledgement of the pain he feels than revelling in it. Coasting. He buries his face in her shoulder and holds onto her when she starts on the second cut. She has to remind him to be still and not flex his arm while she’s working on it; it takes two false starts to get him to comply.

The last stitch in, she cleans the wounds with alcohol. It’s going to burn, but she doesn’t warn Fergus when she splashes a healthy glug of it right onto the stitches. His whole body goes taut and he whines through his teeth. Not relaxing until it’s dry and she’s pat the skin between the wounds down with the last clean towel. She runs the pad of her thumb under the stitches, trying to soothe with a gentle touch. A part of her wants to lean down and press her lips to it.

So she does, not caring what it’ll look like. His skin his hot under her lips, tight and swollen from all the attention. She presses one to the space between the first and second, another between the second and third. Then straightens again.

When she does, he’s curling up around her. That’s when she hears it. The first inconsistency in his breathing. She barely has the time to register what’s happening before it escalates and he’s clutching her shirt, breathing raggedly, trembling all over.

Rosamund turns in his arms. Lets him cling to her. She runs her fingers through his damp, tousled hair, scratching lightly along the scalp, trying to offer what comfort she can. Rosamund doubts her judgment then, asking herself questions she has no way to answer. Did she go too far? What could she have done differently? What was she thinking doing this at all?

Truth was, reluctant as she might be to admit it, she hadn’t been thinking. From the moment she’d gotten back to the couch, she’d made all her decisions on an impulse, on a gut feeling, instinct, intuition, a baser hindbrain urge. On all the things the nuns had told her never to listen to.  

And it kills her a little inside to have strayed so far from their lessons.

He buries his face in the crook of her neck and sobs. Bitten back, bitter crying. The way people who are trying to hold back cry. The kind that comes with failure soaked through with angry helplessness. Quiet, choked, the kind that gives children hiccups and makes them gag and leaves adults with pounding headaches, swollen eyes, and tacky cheeks for hours afterward. She’s painfully familiar with it. So much so she feels her eyes burn and her throat tighten in sympathy.

Rosamund wraps an arm around his shoulders. She pets him and coos into his hair. “Shh. You’re okay. It’s okay now. It’s over.” A firm kiss to his temple, “You did well, sweetheart, it’s okay.” And she repeats it until she’s babbling in time with his erratic breathing. She isn’t sure why she’s saying all this, but it feels like the right thing to do. It soothes _ her  _ conscience, even if it doesn’t offer  _ him _ anything.

It feels like ages before he finally calms down again. Though, logically, Rosamund knows it couldn’t be more than a few minutes.  He swallows hard, his throat clicking, and doesn’t move. Even when she cranes her neck and nudges him so she can press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. Rosamund doesn’t want to admit the reaction rattled her, but she can’t keep all of the tremor out of her voice when she asks, “How do feel, Fergus?” 

She has to tug on his ear to get him answer her with actual words. “Better.”

Rosamund breathes a little easier. “That’s good, sweetheart.” She coaxes him against the back of the couch so she has room to finish wrapping his wounds. He doesn’t react as she presses smooth gauze to the stitches and wraps them to keep everything in place. She takes a second to breathe once it’s done, resting her head against his shoulder and running her thumb over the line where the edge of the wrapping meets the crook of his elbow.

Eventually, she can’t ignore the mess they’ve made of Fergus and Lawrence’s coffee table. She needs to get the towels in the sink to soak if those stains are ever going to come out. She starts to get up, but is stopped by Fergus clinging to her. “Don’t leave.” He mumbles, pulling her back down and she has no choice but to go with the pull.

What was a few more minutes? Lawrence worked nights, he wouldn’t be back for a few more hours anyway. She had time.

She sighs and makes herself comfortable on the sofa, guiding him along with her. He hisses through his teeth as his back pulls the heavy wool blanket with him for a few inches. She leans against the arm of the couch, her feet planted on the floor so he has enough space to lie down. He settles against her, his head on her chest, wounded arm curled up protectively between them. 

She dozes with him a little tracing nonsense patterns with her nails on the space between the lash marks on his back. Surprised at how worn out she is too. She isn’t certain how much time passes like that, but when her neck goes stiff and her back starts to ache she decides however much time has passed is enough.

Gently, she shakes Fergus until he makes a noise. “I need to clean all this up,” she says softly, sweetly, the motherly tone that is so often pointed out to her. “I’m gonna get up now.”

Fergus makes a noise she thinks is affirmative. When she presses a kiss to his forehead he tips his chin up. Without even the slightest reluctance, Rosamund gets the hint and presses a proper one to his lips. It’s a slow, groggy thing, but she finds she likes it just as much as all the ones before it.

When she pulls away he sinks back down onto the cushions. She collects their bundle of discarded clothes, wrapping his shirt and jacket in her cardigan, and lifts his head so he can use it instead of is shredded arm as a pillow. She pulls the wool blanket down over him for good measure.

Only when she straightens her back and stretches does she realize how shaky her limbs are, how shaken she is. Like nearly being hit by a car or lightning strike too close for comfort. She stands there, shins pressed to the couch for balance, and breathes until she feels solid again.

The towels end up in the half-full sink with the ice water once she’s fished out the blade. She scrubs them as best she can, grateful they aren’t white and she can kind of half-ass it and still get away with it. Her hands get a similarly thorough washing well after they’re numb from the cold. Rosary back in her bag. First-aid kit back in the laundry room. Towels in the dryer, sink drained, coffee table wiped down of blood splatter, and she’s satisfied the most damning evidence of her involvement in all this is gone. Save for the salt and her things.

It takes considerable effort to rouse Fergus again. She isn’t sure if he’s actually sleeping or just passed out, but she knows he probably shouldn’t continue to do it on the couch. He makes a low, angry noise when he’s alert enough to notice her petting his hair to wake him, so she grabs a handful at the nape of his neck and tugs until his head comes up an inch. 

He makes a strangled noise and blinks at her with his good eye.

“You gotta get up.” She explains, “Lawrence catches you out here like this, he’ll throw a fit.” That and this couch is an abomination of nature designed to ensure that anyone who sleeps on it turns into a pretzel. But she feels that message is a bit too complicated for him right now.

He blinks at her again, then pushes himself up. She barely manages to stop him from using his wounded arm to do it. 

Rosamund sometimes wonders how much pain Fergus actually  _ can _ feel at this point if popping stitches is nothing to him. While he struggles to stand, she collects her things; clothing, bag, and the jar of salt. She helps him to his feet and keeps him steady with a hand on the back of his neck, guiding him back into his bedroom and ultimately to his bed. He just sort of collapses on it. 

Comfort is for the weak willed, she supposes, huffing out a laugh through her nose as she stashes her bag and the bundle under his desk and well out of the way.

When she goes to return the salt to its place under Fergus’s bathroom sink she gets a good look at herself in the mirror and it’s alarming. Her face is pale, her eyes vacant even though she tries to focus on her reflection. Her white button-down is slashed with bright lines of red just below her breasts. She can feel where the blotches cling to her, congealed and sticky from exposure to the air. There’s little smears of blood everywhere on her now that she looks; on her cheek and her arms where the scrubbing didn’t reach. There’s wide, darker patch on her black skirt from where the towel soaked through. 

She takes off the shirt, where the bloodstains are most obvious, tries to rinse them out and hangs the wet thing over Fergus’s shower curtain rod. Then, she rummages around in his drawers for the t-shirt he’d let her borrow last time she stayed late without supplies. Really, she could just take any of his shirts, he wouldn’t care, he rarely wears them anyway. But Rosamund is sentimental about the soft grey thing with its black torch print and the broken elastic in the collar and that’s the only one she’ll settle for.

She finds it set aside in a drawer at the top of his dresser that would be empty if not for the two Bibles tucked into the corner (she assumes its one for each language he speaks, but doesn’t bother to look) and doesn’t question it.  She slips it on and feels human again in the ten steps it takes her to take off her bra, stash it with her cardigan, and collapse on the bed with Fergus.

Comfort is for the weak willed indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> This is only a rough draft because really, I just needed to get this out of my system. I have nothing else to say for myself when it comes to this. Other than, y'know, the obvious 'I do not condone these kinds of shenanigans irl'
> 
> Characters are from another, longer fic I'm planning but won't announce until it's closer to being made real/postable. But that one will be set in the canon universe, not a modern AU like this one.
> 
> I had way too much fun incorporating the canon barks into this.
> 
> And the title is from Hozier's _Take Me to Church_
> 
> Thanks for reading


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